I haven’t had a lot of time to cook, between being very busy with work and then traveling for the holidays, so I was concerned about this installment of Quarterly Noms. However, it occurred to me that I do a number of things because of not having time, to try to still eat well despite that. Here are some.
When I do have time, I try to stock the freezer with things I can take for lunch and have for dinner. I don’t just use them straight through (I wouldn’t want to have the same thing so many times in a row anyway), but they are an excellent supplement and last a couple of months. This time around I made some standby favorites: spinach chicken pie and stuffed bread, both with turkey frozen after Thanksgiving. The name “spinach chicken pie” is a bit misleading, since the recipe also heavily features tomato and potato, the former in the filling along with onion, tarragon, garlic, and cheese. I modified the original recipe, from a forgotten magazine many years ago, so the crust is now frozen spinach and sweet potatoes, instead of the original wilted fresh spinach and baking potatoes. I found the fresh spinach completely disintegrated, making the dough a sort of green Play-Doh-like substance which was hard to work with and not incredibly appetizing. The frozen spinach seems to hold together better, giving an appealing mottled look in which you can still tell the components. The crust also includes egg, salt, and flour. I use an extra-deep pie pan for this, and often still have overflow – sweet potatoes are bigger than regular potatoes, and I also throw in more spinach than is called for.
The recipe titled “stuffed whole wheat bread” gives no clue whatsoever to its contents, which are ground turkey, pesto, fennel, onion, chive and onion cream cheese, bread crumbs, and spinach. It is absolutely delicious hot or cold. I was going to buy whole wheat pizza dough to make calzone-sized versions, but decided to be ambitious and make my own bread. I used a combination of barley flour and King Arthur Flour’s white whole wheat, a finely milled whole wheat flour that is basically just as healthy as wheat flour without needing the special accommodations. The barley flour is because when I got some bad cholesterol numbers – despite being a pretty good weight, exercising regularly, and eating lots of vegetables and not much dairy fat or white flour – I did research on how one can lower cholesterol, hoping perhaps I could tweak my diet and see some improvement. Barley extract has apparently been shown to do very good things for cholesterol. It is not commercially available, or at least it wasn’t when I was checking, but since then I have tried to increase the regularity with which I eat barley. This was my first experiment with barley flour. I used my grad school officemate’s bread recipe, which relies on you knowing what bread dough should feel like when it has the right amount of flour in it, but is otherwise easy and good. The bread is stuffed between the first and second rises if there are two, and between the second and third if there are three.
Of course, I made an error. Barley has WAY LESS gluten than wheat, though it is not gluten-free, and so using half barley flour severely caps the amount the dough can rise and makes it fragile – it breaks apart like aerated cookie dough instead of stretching. I should have used all barley flour in the spinach chicken pie, where that wouldn’t have mattered, and significantly less in this. However, it worked okay; it was just a bit harder to manage and calzones were out of the question.
As a final note, one of my primary weapons for healthy eating when work is busy is making salads ahead. On Sundays I make salads for the week’s lunches, chopping and mixing and distributing into five containers. This allows me to have a decent variety of vegetables in my salads, save time by doing everything at once, and (most importantly) make sure they are there and easy to eat. To prevent Thursday and Friday’s salads from having that “off” smell, I put a single folded paper towel in the top of each container, which absorbs excess water and keeps the salad fresh for the needed length of time.
I also dress my salads with plain balsamic vinegar, which I keep in a travel toiletry bottle in my desk. You could use any dressing that doesn’t need refrigeration – a friend likes to dress her salads with soy sauce and olive oil, which would certainly work.
Happy healthy eating!
